Tag: mobile broadband

Spotify Mobile: 3UK bundles with HTC Hero

On 19/10/2009

A couple of weeks ago, I pondered Spotify’s impact on music business models and suggested that mobile may have a role to play in the monetization end of it (which is, unless you’re Twitter, an inherent part of a business model indeed). It didn’t take them long:

Today, the UK arm of 3 – always one of the more creative carriers – announced a handset (and not a bad one either) to be bundled with Spotify Premium (i.e. on the go and no ads): users will pay £99 up front, and then £35 a month for 24 months for a tariff including a Spotify Premium subscription covering both PC and mobile, 750 minutes voice calls, unlimited texts, data and Skype-to-Skype calls. Listen up: all bandwidth included. For a streaming service. Now we’re talking!

3 said that the Spotify Premium service was

worth £240

which suggests that they might want to stick to the £9.99 price point (which would surprise me). But then it is hard to tell which bit of such announcements is marketing and which actual price-setting for the sake of royalties and such like…

3 also said

that the deal with Spotify would extend to other products in the coming months, including 3’s mobile broadband service.

Again, I am curious about the price point: the way it is, it would be a nice marketing deal for Spotify but it could be said that not much was going for taking exactly that offer vs just signing up as it is already. A little discounted however (with the difference paid for by 3’s marketing department) might change the ball game altogether…

It’s all good though: I for one am truly intrigued by the prospect of having more than 6 million tracks (equating to, what?, 6 terabyte or so of music) on my phone!

And one little thing on the side: it is – again – an app and not the mobile web that they choose – in spite of bandwidth apparently not being an issue at all. It is thus another argument for the superiority (for the time being) of apps over mobile web when it comes to UI and input constraints.

Global Telecoms and Broadband Stats: Mobile Broadband outstrips Fixed-Line

By Volker

On 07/10/2009

In 1

The United Nations’ agency for telecoms, ITU, has released a set of numbers on mobile and broadband penetration globally. There have been many times more mobile phones than fixed-line telephones on the planet for a while now but now this also applies to broadband connections: by the end of 2009, the ITU expects 600m mobile broadband subscriptions globally compared to only 500m for fixed-line equivalents.

This is not to say that all is good already. The divide between the so-called first and third worlds is immense: the broadband penetration in Europe is 20%, in Africa only 0.1%. And it is the latter where the exponential further growth of mobile (telephony and broadband) will lie then: the competition mobile networks have from fixed lines is much lower in territories with less legacy networks built. And in rural parts of Africa (and elsewhere), the cost of putting up the respective infrastructure makes the installation of fixed line networks simply untenable.

The cost of ICT spend represent a whopping 41% of an African average monthly income. In the Americas (average of North and South), this is c. 7% and in Europe just over 1%.

Here’s some other bits from the ITU’s facts and figures:

4.6bn estimated mobile subscribers by end of 2009.
25% of the world’s population uses the Internet.
China has overtaken the US as the country with the biggest broadband subscriber base (but still has “only” 6.2% penetration rate on a subscription (as opposed to household) basis.
Of the world’s population (6.9bn), 70.8% (or 4.9bn) have access to a TV at home (not equal to number of TV sets) and 27.3% (1.9bn) have access to a PC at home. By number of households, this looks as follows: 1.7bn households globally, 1.3bn of which have a TV and 600m a PC. The gap is expected to narrow quickly due to declining prices and ongoing convergence.
The US accounts for 82.6% of all mobile broadband subscriptions in the Americas (North and South). In Asia and the Pacific, 70% of such subscriptions are in Japan and South Korea.
The top 5 most highly developed ICT economies (listen up, Mr Scoble) are:

Sweden,
South Korea,
Denmark,
Netherlands, and
Iceland

Japan ranks on # 12, the US ranks on # 17, Canada on # 19 and Russia on # 50.

The ITU provides some reports as downloads: The World in 2009 [PDF] as well as a statistical profile on the state of the information society in Africa [PDF].

Orange UK: Mobile Broadband Roars!

By Volker

On 14/05/2009

Orange UK, one of the large carriers in the country with 15.8m mobile subscribers, has released its “Fifth Digital Media Index”, containing a set of interesting numbers on the data uptake on their network, and it makes for intriguing reading!

The carrier recorded a whopping 4,125% (!) increase in data use over dongles using their mobile network in the last 12 months with dongle subscriptions growing by 504%. Data use from handset increased by 108% and that, I might add, without the help of the iPhone (which is exclusive to O2 in the UK). The increase from dongles will be connected to a big push this offering has seen in the UK (as in other countries) over the past period. Carriers have been and are promoting these aggressively, helping uptake of mobile broadband significantly.

Here are some highlights from the report:

Music and video downloads increased both by 38%.
Games only grew by 8% (but at least they grew; anecdotally, some other carriers recorded sometimes dramatic drops in take-up) to a total of 770,000 downloaded games, which equates to a market share of 23% of all UK games downloads (the total UK games market would hence be 3.35m downloads for the year with Orange claiming top spot). From the top 10 downloaded games in 2008, 8 were part of the carrier’s embed programme, which shows – again – that users appear more comfortable if they can try it out before (embedded games normally are trial versions).
Social network use over mobile increased by 129% in page impressions per month and 48% in unique users. The monthly average number of pages per user was 397. In terms of popularity of social networks, Orange’s Mark Watt-Jones (@MWJ) fed us additional bits via the Twittersphere: Facebook dominates, Bebo is significant, MySpace less so and Twitter grows very quickly (what was the Oprah moment in the UK?)
An average of 386,000 GB of data have been transferred via dongles and handsets per month.
Mobile search grew by 120% with 45% of the results being “off-portal”, i.e. outside Orange’s domains.
Good old SMS still looking good, too: 19% growth with 1.7bn sent every month.

Another key point Mark brought us via Twitter: 99% of access to social network sites came from non-smartphones. This is quite noteworthy indeed as it arguably shows that mobile data usage now transcends beyond the power users on sophisticated handsets and also that content leads the uptake: give people compelling content, and they’ll use it. Mobile data for the masses seems to have arrived!